syndrome

Syndrome

(pop culture)

When innocent hero-worship goes unrequited, the consequences can be dire for both the admirer and the admired. Pixar's computer-animated film The Incredibles (2004) presents a case in point in one Buddy Pine, a decidedly non-superpowered adolescent with a talent for invention and a stalker-like obsession with the ultrastrong superhero known as Mr. Incredible. After taxing the hero's patience with endless requests for fan-club souvenirs, Buddy follows Mr. Incredible to a robbery scene in the rocket-boot-propelled persona of IncrediBoy and announces his intention to become Mr. Incredible's sidekick. Unimpressed by Buddy's efforts—Buddy's arrival allows the incendiary Francophone thief Bomb Voyage to escape capture, and very nearly gets Buddy killed as well—Mr. Incredible brusquely sends the boy home. Shortly thereafter, a string of expensive injury lawsuits drives America's superheroes underground, Mr. Incredible included. Meanwhile, the spurned Buddy parlays his developing technological expertise in a full-blown evil empire based on selling high-tech weaponry to dictators and tyrants around the world. Fifteen years after being brushed off by Mr. Incredible, the resentful Buddy Pine has metamorphosed into a self-styled, technologically powered costumed supervillain called Syndrome. Syndrome's agent, a mysterious and beautiful young woman named Mirage, helps him track down the former Mr. Incredible, whose enforced retirement to a prosaic suburban existence has transformed him into Bob Parr, a fat and depressed family man. Syndrome plans to kill Mr. Incredible using a giant Omnidroid robot, a device whose development expended the lives of a large number of Bob Parr's retired superhero colleagues—Universal Man, Psycwave, Everseer, Macroburst, Phylange, Blazestone, Downburst, Hyper Shock, Apogee, Blazerman, Tradewind, Vectress, Gazerbeam, Stormicide, and Gamma Jack among them. Syndrome never got over the pain of Mr. Incredible's rejection, and has spent the intervening years using quasimagical technologies such as “Zero Point Energy” to compensate for his lack of superpowers. “Everyone can be super,” he says, warning his captured former idol of his eventual plans to sell his technologically simulated powers to one and all. “And when everyone's super … no one will be.” After getting even with Parr, Syndrome plans to release his Omnidroid in downtown New York, and then bask in the city's gratitude after appearing to wrestle the metal menace into submission. But in typical power-mad villain fashion, Syndrome overreaches himself by risking Mirage's life when he calls Mr. Incredible's bluff after the captured hero threatens to kill her; Syndrome also ensures his own downfall by threatening the lives of Mr. Incredible's wife Helen Parr (nee Elastigirl) and their two eldest children, Dashiell (the fleet-footed Dash) and Violet (who possesses invisibility and forcefield-casting powers, à la the Fantastic Four's Sue Storm). Devastated after the Parrs and the ice-powered superhero Frozone end up receiving all the credit for halting the Omnidroid's New York rampage, Syndrome attempts to abduct the Parrs' infant son Jack-Jack with the intent of grooming the child into a sidekick. But the baby's developing flame powers and frightening physical transformations make him literally too hot to handle. Undone by Jack-Jack's sabotage of his rocket boots—and by an automobile hurled at him by an angry Mr. Incredible—Syndrome's own cape drags him into a jet turbine. After fifteen years, Buddy Pine's confused love-hate relationship with Mr. Incredible comes to a tragic, if poetically just, finish. Visually based on aspects of The Incredibles writer-director Brad Bird, animator John Kahres, and animation supervisor Steven Clay Hunter, the young Buddy Pine and his adult supervillain persona are both voiced with a comics fanboy's earnest intensity by Jason Lee, star of Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy (1997) and NBC's My Name Is Earl (2005–present). Lee's energetic performance gives Syndrome a wounded, sinister-yetsympathetic quality that makes the character impossible to hate, despite his many reprehensible actions.

Syndrome

a specific combination of disease symptoms determined by a single pathogenesis. A syndrome is not equivalent to a disease as a nosologic form, since the causes of a syndrome may be different. For example, meningeal syndrome, or irritation of the meninges, may be a result of the disruption of cerebral circulation (subarachnoid hemorrhage) and a menin-gococcic infection, and uremic syndrome is the final stage of many kidney diseases.

The basic symptoms of a syndrome are revealed upon the direct observation of an afflicted individual; these symptoms may include stomach pain, vomiting, muscular tension in the anterior abdominal wall, and Blumberg’s sign, which indicates peritoneal irritation with acute abdomen. Other syndromic symptoms are revealed through laboratory and instrumental methods; for example, changes in an electrocardiogram indicate Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, which is a specific form of abnormal myocardial function.

Modern medicine distinguishes approximately 1,500 syndromes. Many are named in honor of those who discovered them, for example, the Morgagni-Adams-Stokes syndrome, or paroxysmal oligemia of the brain caused by a heart block, whose symptoms include syncope and convulsions. Other syndromes are named in honor of those in whom they were first observed or in honor of literary figures. For example, Munchausen’s syndrome is a mental condition characterized by false complaints of bleeding and functional disorders.

The development of medical knowledge, including a more precise definition of the etiologic, or causal, factors of diseases determined by the environment or genetics, has resulted in the replacement of syndromic diagnosis and pathogenic treatment with a nosologic approach and specific causal treatment.

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